Day 7

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to Day 7 of the Writing Challenge! How are you doing? If you included the weekend in your writing goals, were you able to make progress? I’ll be honest, on Friday, it took me 3 tries to get 30 minutes of writing in. Clearly if my day had been busier, I would not have made it!
I am currently doing a different type of writing than I am used to. We have been asked to write about how and why we incorporated a web and social media presence into ADVANCE at UNM from the beginning, as this is an unusual approach. I have found a recent Chronicle article on the importance of asking – and re-asking – the “So What?” question to be helpful as I develop the structure for our chapter (So What?).

When I finally managed to stop distracting myself, I was suddenly able to look at the chapter from the perspective of the reader and identify some components that will be required if the work is actually going to make sense to anyone outside of the project. I would definitely not have persisted without knowing lots of other people were also struggling to make progress at the end of the week. My Friday ideas carried me through my writing time on Saturday but Sunday was closer to:

and turned into a Hummingbird Writing session. The hummingbirds in my backyard flit between flowers, visit the feeder, sip sugar water, perch on the feeder and look around, chase other hummingbirds away from the feeder … and it seems to me that they have to be expending more energy than they are taking in. I did the writing equivalent of this behavior. I flitted between sections adding a sentence here, tweaking a phrase there, making notes on figures that will be required…and I didn’t even notice that yesterday I had titled the first draft of today’s blog “Bog Day 7” which was certainly an apt description for Sunday.

Today I able to focus, aided by the knowledge that my co-authors are back from vacation at the end of this week and expect to be allowed to read what I have been writing!
If you have apps, articles or approaches that help or inspire you, let us know. Lindsay and I will summarize everything in the final blog of the Challenge.

Good luck with your Monday writing!
Write on,